A PSA on recharging your battery

Please remember: Recharging your (emotional/mental/physical/spiritual) battery… may not feel good.  

Sometimes, it may feel downright bad.

A few reasons why:

• Your nervous system may agitated and fried.
  
  You can avoid feeling uncomfortable body sensations when your life is still zooming along. After all, there’s always a new important thing to focus your brain on — you may be able to avoid feeling your body at all!
  
  But once you slow down and try to rest, you may no longer be able to avoid the sensations that were always there, beneath the surface. They do get better over time — but the first brush with them tends to be the most intense.

• You may have unprocessed anxiety, insecurity, fear, sadness, or anger.
  
  These unprocessed feelings could be about completely “understandable” topics (the loss of someone you love, for example), but could just as easily be about things you don’t deem “worthy” of such pain (a stupid comment by a coworker) — and yet, there they are.
  
  These feelings may be easy to ignore when your life is moving fast, but they rush in when there is some space. And boom — you’re overflowing with resentment, or anger, or grief, or shame.

• Your brain may flip out.
  
  When you slow down and try to rest, your brain may throw thoughts at you like: “you’re falling behind,” “you’ll never meet your goals,” and “other people don’t need so much rest like this.” Or even: “You’ve already been resting for an hour/day/week/month, you *should* feel better by now!”
  
  It’s hard to feel calm and at peace with a chaotic brain.  

• You may not know how to recharge.
  
  A lot of lip service is paid nowadays to “self-care” — but I find that many people have not engaged with enough depth, iteration, and time with the complex work of truly recharging a profoundly empty battery.
  
  Sure, sure, baths and walks and journaling can all help. But what is your very particular prescription, in this very particular season of your life?

I don’t say this to discourage you.

I say it because I find, too often, people are discouraged by the process of actually refilling their tank. They hoped it would feel like getting a massage in a white terrycloth robe. And sure, sometimes it feels like that. But it can also feel… quite challenging.

It can take a profound curiosity + courage to decide that this is a priority, and pursue it.

And above all: it can be done.
And: you can do it.

As always, I’m rooting for you. You’ve got this.

Katie

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